Historians are always looking for a new lens through which to view and understand the past. The modern history of popular sentiment toward masturbation offers a fascinating perspective on our culture. Having an idea of the depth of feeling against masturbation in general and female masturbation in particular, we may better understand why women have been so late in accepting their sexual fantasies. So long as they were cut off from masturbation, they were cut off from their inner erotic lives.
At times the historic carryings-on over masturbation sound crazed, more theater-of-the-absurd than the real thinking and behavior of our ancestors. Simultaneously, there is an eerie ring of recognition.
Take for instance the popular theory that held that a man’s semen was limited and represented his entire storehouse of energy. Every time he ejaculated, he lost some of his virility, manhood. A wise man spent his se
men as frugally as the money in his bank. Doctors once advised patients to avoid all sex prior to such major events as military engagements, sports competitions, and important business powwows. (When I tell my husband this, he insists many men still believe and act on the myth.) In the latter part of the nineteenth century, nocturnal emissions were thought to be such a terrible waste that doctors recommended nightly cold-water enemas before bed.
As for women, we have been seen as bloodsuckers who, given half a chance, would drain a man dry of his precious bodily fluids. (Conversely, simultaneously, and in keeping with the whore/madonna mentality, women have also been seen as hating sex, merely going through the motions to arrive at the far more satisfying maternal emotion.)
For much of the century the only acceptable sexual activity that war-ranted spending precious semen was procreation, and nothing, nothing was more deplorable, more wasteful and dangerous than masturbation, which purportedly led to epilepsy, blindness, vertigo, deafness, headache, impotency, loss of memory, rickets, and a diminution in the size of the penis, to mention only a few afflictions.
No one in this country typified this kind of maniacal thinking better than two all-American heroes of the nineteenth century Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg. The latter hated sex so deeply that he never consummated his long marriage. But like many antipornographers, he was obsessed with the subject of sex in general and determined to eliminate it in the lives of other individuals.
As a highly respected, licensed physician, Kellogg attracted a wide readership for his views on masturbation; circumcision was his remedy for the chronic masturbator, circumcision “without an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.”
Graham and Kellogg shared an aversion to masturbation, and both be-lieved in a mysterious connection between food and sex. Applying a certain Yankee ingenuity to their fanaticism, each in his turn came up with a bestselling, antimasturbation food: Graham invented the Graham cracker and Kellogg his famous cornflakes, snacks guaranteed to stave off the longing for the “secret sin” of self-abuse.
Nor did this kind of deluded thinking disappear as we entered the enlightened twentieth century. Here is a description of someone who masturbates, taken from a small book published in 18 editions by the YMCA and recommended reading for Boy Scouts up to 1927:
“As this act is repeated from week to week, or in some extreme cases, every day or two, the youth feels the foundations of his manhood undermined. He notes that his muscles are becoming more and more flabby; that his back is weak, his eyes after a time become sunken and ‘fishy,’ his hands clammy; he is unable to look anybody straight in the eye. As the youth becomes conscious of his weakness, he loses confidence, refuses to take part in athletic sports; avoids the company of his young women friends; and becomes a non-entity in the athletic and social life of the community. So far as his school record is concerned, he may succeed very well in his studies for a number of years but eventually his memory begins to fail, and just at the time when he is trying to prepare for some useful life work, he wakes up to the realization that his mind is as flabby as his muscles, lacking in force, originality and power to think things out.”
It wasn’t until the 1959 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook that the attitude toward masturbation was softened: “Any real boy knows that anything that arouses him to worry should be avoided. It will help you to throw yourself into a vigorous game, work at an absorbing hobby, strive to live up to your own high ideals. Here, Scouting is your ally, as you live up to the tenth point of the Scout law – ‘A Scout is Clean.”’
Once the American Medical Association put its “normal” label on mas-turbation in 1972, the handbook withdrew from the fray, never again to mention masturbation, simply advising Scouts to seek advice and counseling from parents and religious leaders should they have “strong feelings” about what is happening to their bodies. Nor is there any explanation or elaboration as to what these feelings might be.
I’ve not mentioned the Girl Scout Handbook because there is nothing in it on masturbation. Not a word, not ever. Are we to assume that patriarchal society didn’t/doesn’t care about female masturbation? Omission speaks louder than words.
Early twentieth-century man lived in a dizzying, swivel-headed attitude toward women’s sexuality. He needed to see woman as chaste, passive, spiritual, she who was so close to heaven she could save his very soul after a murderous day of competition in the new industrial society. This was known as “the cult of the household nun.”
Meanwhile, the opposite hemisphere of man’s brain was besotted with images of women who were carnivorous in bacchanalian hunger for their bodies. An eminent doctor warned that female masturbation led to nymphomania, “occurring more commonly in blondes than in brunettes.”
There was a popular school of painting early in this century that catered especially to man’s split vision of woman. These large oil canvases depicted naked women lying about, usually in pastoral scenes, and allowed a man to gaze for hours, satisfying his voyeuristic fantasies without fear. The women, you see, always had their eyes closed and looked near death, or so obviously exhausted that they were in no position to make demands on the man’s precious bodily fluids. And it was understood why they were so worn out; their carefully painted snakelike hands lay suspiciously close to that forbidden area between their legs. Often they were shown in groups, intertwined, their heads on one another’s breasts. A man could well imagine what they’d been up to – that left to ourselves, we women would soon be encouraging one another in the “criminal” practice of masturbation. Doctors warned that girls’ boarding schools were literal hotbeds of young female proselytizers, eager to vamp one another into the practice of mastur-bation.
Imagine these two warring halves of women long enough and we arrive at the 1950s when Hollywood created Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe, who satisfied both extremes of men’s appetite. You would never imagine Doris’s hands between her legs; and Marilyn, poor victim of her own sexual appetite, died young.

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